This month the nonprofit celebrates 20 years of helping cancer patients. How has the foundation survived through a very public break with its founder?

The ties that bind Livestrong to founder Lance Armstrong were severed, yet they remain strong in the public mind.

Photo Illustration: Patrick White

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The morning of Monday, Jan. 14, 2013, was blossoming into the kind of seasonally ideal Austin day that tourist brochures rhapsodize about: sunny skies, crisp air, the temperature at 51 degrees. But inside the usually bustling East Side headquarters of the nonprofit Livestrong Foundation, the atmosphere was off-kilter. Everyone sensed a storm was coming. They just didn’t know where or when.

Arriving for work, staff members were met with an odd sight: The usually welcoming windows facing East Sixth Street were shuttered. As bewildered employees entered the strangely quiet building, they were directed into the boardroom. The scuttlebutt was that some important announcement was imminent, and the collective pall on the faces of senior management didn’t bode well.

Nerves at the organization were already dangerously frayed. Six months earlier, the United States Anti-Doping Agency had released a scathing report accusing Lance Armstrong, the charity’s celebrated and controversial founder, of doping, and he was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles. By October 2012, he had stepped down as chairman of his own foundation, and then, amid increasing pressure from all sides, resigned from the board altogether.

Everyone in the room also knew that, only days earlier, Armstrong had announced his plans to do a no-holds-barred, much-publicized television interview with Oprah Winfrey to “come clean.” He’d just returned from a respite in Hawaii and was now being stalked by press and paparazzi everywhere back in Austin. Media trucks circled the Livestrong headquarters in pursuit.

The boardroom was so crowded that hardly anyone noticed when, through a side door, Armstrong himself quietly materialized, almost as if part of a magician’s orchestrated illusion.

The usually robust cyclist appeared wan and tremulous as his longtime friend and Livestrong CEO, Doug Ulman, handed over the floor to him with a strangely detached formality. Armstrong’s normally steely gaze drifted downward, avoiding eye contact with his audience. Speaking in a restrained, almost monotonic cadence—like a child reluctantly reciting the alphabet in a foreign language—he stumbled through a vague and awkward apology to the staff for the damage he had inflicted, then he announced that he was leaving to tape the TV interview that would explain everything. As suddenly as he had appeared, he was gone.

Three days later, more than 4.3 million viewers would tune in to watch the once-revered athlete and cancer survivor squirm and shift as he admitted to Winfrey what he had vehemently denied in public for years: That he had used performance-enhancing drugs to achieve his phenomenal series of victories.

Just like that, Armstrong’s seemingly unstoppable cycle of successes came crashing down, leaving collateral damage in its wake—friends, believers, sponsors and, perhaps most devastatingly, Livestrong, the organization he had hoped would prove his most enduring legacy. “That was probably the low point,” recalls Livestrong’s then-CFO, Greg Lee. “I’d been there six years, worked really hard—and then it just caved in right in front of me in a matter of moments.”